Standish taking over cable television station

STANDISH — The City of Standish recently purchased new video production equipment, via the cable council, and upon a brief re-training period, will take over the duties of managing Channel 3 on Charter’s Cable Television Network.

According to Standish City Clerk Becky Lakin, previously five area cities and townships belonged to the cable council but now only Standish City and Standish Township remain.

“The cable council was established about 10 years ago,” Lakin said. “Five of us (townships and cities) joined.

“The equipment used to be here but went to Pinconning a few years ago.”

She added because of lack of proper use, Standish City officials decided to repossess the equipment, along with ordering new equipment, to make over the channel’s content and possibly set up a partnership with Standish-Sterling Community Schools District, as it owns video recording equipment, which the city lacks. She says the equipment is finally up to 21st century standards and will be utilized more efficiently.

“Nobody else cares to do it, we (city) have the capabilities to air now,” Lakin said. “We’ll try to incorporate something with the schools.”

Lakin says the new equipment consists of two new monitor systems (Elitegold Display systems), two software programs (IBM TextPro Sr. Creation Software) and system memory upgrades.

“There’s some really neat things you can do,” the clerk said. She added as soon as training is complete, the city will look at the current content on the station to decide which will simply be updated and which will be deleted.

Lakin says Display Systems International, Inc. — the Canadian company the city purchased some equipment from — will conduct re-training and the city welcomes new ideas for productions.

“One of the ideas, initially for the station, was to show football games and things like that,” Lakin said. “We can’t show it live because we don’t have that equipment yet but now we at least have the capability to show a recording if someone had one.”

Channel 3 on Charter in Standish currently displays meeting times for various municipalities and government units.